The 2006 Mobile Impact Award winners

Summary: Tennant Company is a world-leading manufacturer of indoor and outdoor cleaning solutions and specialty coatings. They have over 550 field technicians calling on thousands of customers worldwide. Their existing business processes - which were largely manual and paper-based - had become a choking point for service, revenue, and operations. Tennant wanted its service technicians to focus on repairing equipment, not completing paperwork. They also wanted to eliminate billing errors and make customers less dependent on call center support for quotes, orders, and billing issues.

Tennant wanted to mobilize its customized SAP ERP applications quickly, at low cost, and to achieve high levels of user acceptance and adoption. It wanted a mobile enterprise solution its field service representatives could use to instantly access customer service records, real-time parts availability and pricing, technical manuals, service bulletins and other essential information available wirelessly. In addition to achieving rapid results, Tennant wanted to ensure that the chosen system was future-proof and capable of adapting to the fast-paced rate of change at the frontlines of their business.

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Summary: Kelleher Corporation is one of the largest manufacturers and distributors of lumber and molding products in the western U.S. Its largest account is Home Depot, with more than 1,800 home improvement stores throughout North America. As its market became increasingly competitive, Kelleher realized that its inventory tracking and order fulfillment system needed a major overhaul. The company was still using a paper-based system that was slow, error-prone, and difficult to manage.

By wirelessly connecting to Kelleher's back-end database, the smartphone enables field representatives to view customer data plus inventory and order information on any of Kelleher's 5,000 active SKU's, in the field and in real time. As a result, field representatives can better serve customers with on-the-spot updates on the status of their orders. Additionally, Kelleher representatives can verify minimum order quantities. Customers can even receive a fax confirmation minutes after order placement.

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Summary: Northwestern Memorial Hospital, like most healthcare organizations, has a highly mobile workforce, moving from patient to patient, department to department and crisis to crisis. As equipment and procedures become increasingly high-tech and the campus larger and more dispersed, the challenges of connecting people, information and resources grows exponentially.

As one of the country's premier academic medical centers, Northwestern Memorial is constantly looking to embrace technology that will enable them to offer high-value, patient-centered care while delivering a competitive differentiator from other providers. Part of this effort involves the adoption of new wireless technologies, which are becoming an increasingly fundamental part of healthcare decision making, quality care and patient safety. Critical to this adoption was the proper infrastructure to carry and manage a full array of wireless services, applications and devices.

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Summary: As the home to companies like Nokia Corporation and Secgo Software Oy, the Republic of Finland has long been at the forefront of mobility. With Finland serving as the Presidency of the European Union (EU) beginning in July 2006, even the Finnish government found itself in a position to pioneer secure mobile communications. This task - to provide secure mobile access for the Finnish Ministries - was assigned to the Government Information Management Unit (GIMU).

The scope of the project confronting the staff at GIMU was unprecedented. Thousands of government workers would need access. The solution would need to support the ability to maintain secure and seamless connections while traversing virtually every different type of network throughout Finland, other EU countries and other continents: wireless LANs in government offices, public places and peoples' homes; wireless municipal networks; and wireless WANs based on 2.5/3G, GPRS and EDGE; and wired connections, including DSL and dial-up.

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Summary: Duke University Health System is a world-class healthcare network dedicated to providing outstanding patient care, educating tomorrow's healthcare leaders and discovering new and better ways to treat disease through biomedical research. The Health System has approximately 11,400 full-time employees of whom more than 5,000 are Duke University Health System physicians, researchers and faculty. Many of these employees rely on mobile technology to maximize their effectiveness and document their activities.

The most recent available figures document that the organization admitted over 62,000 patients, handled over 1.6 million outpatient visits, performed more than 72,000 surgical procedures and nearly seven million lab procedures in fiscal year 2004. The primary business driver was to advance the Duke University Health System's mission by mobile-enabling its physicians, professors, medical students

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Summary: At Energen, a small IT group is responsible for keeping vital systems up for more than 450 BlackBerry device users. This busy energy company needed a solution to help manage BlackBerry devices for large teams of field personnel who depend on accessing corporate data for critical business activities and for executives that use devices for wireless email.

"Our field personnel are out there managing gas lines and doing safety inspections," says Brad Anderson, Windows System Administrator. Anderson's team valued the importance of around-the-clock service for their internal customers' needs, but they also valued their own quality of life. They needed a solution that enabled them to work effectively without being tied to a desktop computer.

Read the Case Study in this PDF.